There are only so many shapes to choose from in quilting. One of the design elements that I keep coming back to is the half-rectangle triangle and – more specifically – lines with a 1:2 gradient (that is, they go up or down 1 unit with every move sideways of 2 units… as if you laid a 2:1 HRT on its side). I’ve stacked up lines like this in previous sketches (look at Sunday sketches #102 and #103, for example), and I’m revisiting them again this week.

I started with a ‘comb’, which is basically just a series of those diagonal lines, joined up vertically on either side. Then I overlapped another one, and another one, which created these funny little cat faces in the middle.

I decided that maybe I should see what the same design looked like with the ‘combs’ facing different directions. So I redrew the whole thing, alternating the angles. Instead of up-down-up, now they’re down-up-down.

Not a huge difference, although the first column of cats is now upside-down. But somehow I do prefer the second sketch. It has a slightly different feel to me, although I can’t quite put my finger on why.

Anyway, then I decided that I wanted to see more of these combs overlapping, but instead of arranging them vertically, I thought I’d try them horizontally. Time to pull out the A4 Rhoda dot pad for some larger sketching!

Again, this has quite a different feel than the previous two sketches, despite being based on the same core design. The scale is a bit smaller (assuming the overall quilt dimensions were about the same) and there’s a bit more movement. I like them all, but for different reasons.

I love the look of the clean black lines in this sketch, but colour would add another dimension. And there’s obviously some real potential here for transparency in colour play.